


Where My Compass Points

by PanBoleyn



Series: At The Touch of Your Hand [5]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: AU after Avengers 1, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Multi, Not Canon Compliant, minor crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-26
Updated: 2016-01-26
Packaged: 2018-05-16 08:41:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5821771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PanBoleyn/pseuds/PanBoleyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While Tony and Pepper collect Avengers and friends, Steve rides his bike along the East Coast, trying to find his footing in this new life. He can't move forward, figure out where he belongs and what it means to be bonded, until he settles his ghosts, right?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where My Compass Points

When he finally has to leave the museum, Steve rides around the city for a while, and while he's not exactly lost, he also doesn't really know where he is. Then again, this isn't a city he's familiar with, so why would he know exactly where he is? He doesn't need to in order to leave; ride long enough and he'll be out of the city regardless. But eventually the energy bars aren't enough and he has to get some real food, so he parks outside an all-night diner – it's past midnight by now, according to his watch – and goes inside.

 

 

Nice to know some things never change completely. Greasy spoons still smell more or less the same. He sits at the counter on a stool that feels a little too small and orders coffee with cream and sugar. He's sipping it, eyes skimming over the menu, when a petite brunette drops onto the stool next to his. She orders a Coke in an obviously annoyed voice, before her eyes slide over to Steve. Or, more accurately, over to his napkin and the pen in his hand. He'd doodled on the napkin like he always used to do, an old habit that hadn't even registered.

 

 

It's the same thing, though, over and over – a compass rose. “You like maps, or something?” she asks.

 

 

“Hmm? Oh, no,” Steve says. And he doesn't, though maybe it was the quick look he took at his map earlier that reminded him. “No, I, uh, used to live next door to this old sailor. He told me they used to get this tattooed on 'em; it was supposed to... bring good fortune and lead them home again.” Which is why it's in the back of his mind, he supposes; good fortune's something everyone could use, and he... He wishes he had a home to be led to.

 

 

The brunette smiles, a careful, secretive smile. “What if home's not a place?” she asks, and she twists a ring on her finger, looking down at it with the oddest expression on her face. The annoyance from when she first walked in is back, but there's something softer about it now.

 

 

 

“Don't have people t'be home either,” he says instead, and realizes only after the words are out that he's spoken them in the Brooklyn accent he'd thought he'd shaken off at the behest of USO tour people. _'Can't have Captain America sounding like a Brooklyn street kid.'_

 

 

She looks at him with brown eyes gone sharp and maybe too understanding. “I know someone who used to be like that,” she murmurs. “What's your name?”

 

 

“Steve, yours?”

 

 

“Ari.” It's an odd name for a girl, probably a nickname, but then who is he to judge?

 

 

“Well, Ari, now you know my problem, how 'bout you? 'Cause you seemed pretty angry when you came in here.” He's already slipped, to hell with it. The accent slides back into his voice and it's easy. It feels good and right. And, well, Captain America isn't here, so who cares what he sounds like?

 

 

“My boys are driving me crazy,” Ari says, rolling her eyes. She twists her ring again, and Steve sees it's a woven design – copper, bronze, and silver braided together. Regular bonding commitment rings are bands with the sign of infinity, but that... That is a triadic ring. The kind of ring that people with triadic bonds – people like _him_ – wear when they've bonded properly.

 

 

"How is it, bein' bonded t'two people like that?" he asks before he can stop himself.

 

 

"Just bonded, huh?" she asks, a knowing sympathy in her voice.

 

 

"Yeah," Steve admits, rubbing the back of his neck. "How'd you know?"

 

 

"Because I've been there, not so long ago. I met Rob and Yoshi in the middle of a job, and it threw _everything_ for a loop." Ari takes a sip of her soda. "They were already together, bonded, living together, and work partners too. So I had to figure out where I fit with them - not easy, even if they’ve known from the day they bonded that they lacked a third. Knowing that doesn't stop people from making a life together that's just theirs, after all.”

 

 

Steve thinks about this, thinks about the videos he's seen of Tony. Not just that Senate hearing that he begins to think was worryingly out of context, but other videos. Videos that also show a redheaded woman taller than Tony is walking beside him, the pair of them keeping pace easily. He thinks about the magazine he flipped through at a rest stop with an interview with Stark Industries CEO Pepper Potts. Thinks about the two of them, in each other's orbits for over a decade now if he has the timing right. And he can't deny that makes him as uncertain as everything else about being bonded to them does. How is he supposed to find a place between them when he doesn't even have a place for himself in this new world? How can he ever be part of their lives the way they're part of each other's, with so much time lost?

 

 

“So how'd you do it?” he asks Ari, hoping his voice doesn't tremble.

 

 

“Well, it helped that the job we did together was... intense, is probably the best word I can give you for it,” Ari says thoughtfully. “We didn't touch right away; when we were introduced I was busy with hands-on work so I didn't shake their hands. We were halfway through our prep before we found out, and by then we'd already started to become friends. So what we did first was, we just started working as a team, I moved to their city because they were established and I wasn't really. I only lived where I did because of a friend and colleague who was local. But we just... We talked, we went on dates and got to know each other, like anyone else. All three of us, me with just one of them – they go out without me sometimes. It works if you work _for_ it, cheesy as that sounds.”

 

Actually, Steve reflects, it sounds like good sense. But how to act on it? That's the real question at the end of the day. How to start this? He's got a month to himself and he needs that, needs the time to center himself somehow. This is the world he has, this is the world he must learn to live in.

 

 

But Tony and Pepper are going to be part of this world he's found as well.

 

 

After Ari leaves, Steve pays and goes back out to his bike, where he just sits and stares at his phone and the text Tony sent him. Tony wants to know what Philadelphia's like, if Steve knows how to text back and tell him. He does know how to text, actually, even if the keys are a bit small for his hands. So he takes a deep breath, glancing up briefly at the sky. The stars haven't changed, at least, he thinks, and that is something anyway.

 

 

 **A lot more interesting as a tourist than when I stopped here on that ridiculous USO tour...** he types back, the first of many messages for tonight.

 

 

~ ~ ~

 

Pepper calls him two days later. Steve isn't anywhere in particular, having pulled off on the side of the road and wandered into a cluster of trees. It's nothing like the forests in Europe where he'd done so much work, of course, but it's also closer to somewhere he could have stood in 1945 than a good bit of what he sees here in 2012. He's sitting on the ground, sketchbook pulled from his bag and resting in his lap. Even with his pencil in hand he's not drawing with any real focus, little half-finished sketches littering three pages.

 

 

It's soothing and familiar, like so little is anymore. There's Jim Morita, with the quirk to his mouth that means he and Gabe are planning mischief again, but next to him is Agents Romanoff and Barton sitting in the Helicarrier medbay. Dernier leans against a line that would be a doorframe in a full picture, while to his left Bruce Banner is riding an old motorbike as if about to drive off the page – or drive into a battle.

 

(The only Commando not somewhere on the pages is Bucky, the guilt and the grief still too raw. His only family, the one person who knew him better than _anyone_. Steve can't look at Bucky's face yet.)

 

 

And, of course... Peggy, not near so sharp and beautiful as she'd been in life because while Steve's good at art _no one_ could capture everything Peggy was. Peggy fills half the page from different angles – reading a report, with that considering smile of hers, firing a gun at him with fury in her eyes. And on the rest of the page? The Iron Man suit falling from a hole in a sky, Tony with sunglasses shielding his eyes in that moment where they bonded. He reproduces the magazine picture he's seen of Pepper seated at a desk, but also draws a long-fingered hand curled around a phone, that same hand tangled with one of Tony's.

 

 

He's looking at it when his phone starts up its irritating little trill. With a sigh, Steve hits the little green phone button. “Hello?”

 

 

“Hi. I thought we'd get started on the getting to know each other plan,” says Pepper Potts, and Steve blinks. After the texting session with Tony two nights back, he guesses he isn't surprised, and yet he kind of is.

 

 

“Yeah, of course.”

 

 

“I would have called sooner, but I have a million things to keep going right now, and this is probably the first real stretch of time I've had to myself since Tony and I talked to you.” Steve wants to say that she doesn't have to use that time on him, not when she has Tony, or friends, or maybe even just wants to relax for a little, but he doesn't. He thinks of his mother or Peggy, both of whom would have smacked down any man who tried to say they weren't deciding to do a thing because of any reason other than they wanted to do it. He doesn't know if Pepper is anything like them, but from her public persona at least, he'd place a bet or two on it.

 

 

“I remember days like that,” he says instead, setting his sketchbook down and leaning more fully against his bike.

 

 

“What, in the middle of a war zone?”

 

 

“Sometimes just at home. Although a lot of days there wasn't much to do. Same in the war, actually; you get days that are just packed, nonstop, and then downtime so long you all just kinda stare at each other. Some of us got really good at card games and pool.” And some of them, like him and Bucky, had already been good at both in ways that made the rest of the guys refuse to play with them. They could always sucker Howard into it when he came up for air, because the man had been the strangest mix of cynical and naive in some ways.

 

 

“Don't tell Tony, I guarantee the next words out of his mouth will be 'let's play strip poker',” Pepper advises him. “Although with all that practice, maybe you'd manage to keep your clothes. Except I still don't want you to tell him, because he'd try and sweet-talk me into playing, and I'm terrible at poker.”

 

 

“I could always teach you how to count cards,” Steve says without thinking, and then the words are out and he finds he doesn't care. Sure, Captain America cheating at poker is the kind of the thing the brass would've wanted him to keep quiet about, but they're long gone and Steve Rogers made rent money more than once that way.

 

 

Pepper laughs, a slightly muffled sound as though she'd like to laugh loud and long but can't do so where she is. “I'm going to hold you to that, but only after you use these counting card skills to kick Tony's ass where I can watch.”

 

 

“Yes, ma'am,” Steve says, warmed by the laugh and the sudden mischief in her voice. “Hey, can I ask you somethin'?”

 

 

“Go ahead.”

 

 

“I read – God, that sounds awful, but there was this interview with you in a really fancy-lookin' magazine, and I figured, at least I'd know what you looked like 'cause there'd be a picture.”

 

 

“Steve. I don't mind that you read the _Vanity Fair_ interview. I will tell you, I like to think I'm more interesting than I come across there. But anyway, what did you want to know?”

 

 

“Who came up with 'Pepper'? I mean, I don't know how you get that from Virginia, no offense.” It's a ridiculous question, but it seems like a simple enough place to start.

 

 

“Tony did, actually,” Pepper says after a moment. “When we met, I was an accountant for Stark Industries, and I happened to catch a mistake he'd made in some figures. When I went to tell him so, obviously security went to take me out, so I started shouting about having pepper spray. Tony, being Tony, found this hilarious, and when I turned out to be right, decided my name was Pepper now. That's pretty much how Rhodey – James Rhodes, he has the War Machine suit – got his name too; because Tony decided to pin it on him and wouldn't give up on it.”

 

 

Steve has to laugh. Somehow, that story doesn't surprise him at all. “My mother had to change her name,” he says, remembering her telling him the story, Steve curled in close to her side. “Her name was Saoirse when she lived outside Belfast. But then she moved to New York after her mam died and there was no family left at home, and her uncle in New York said he'd found her a job she could do while she studied to be a nurse. Only if she really wanted to be a proper American, he told her, she had to change her name. Saoirse and Sarah, they don't mean the same thing or anythin' like that. She just wanted t'keep her initials the same at least.”

 

 

He doesn't notice he's slowly drifted past his Brooklyn accent to the first accent he'd ever carried, the one he'd lost at the orphanage and yet slipped right back to when he and Bucky were running small-time cons to put food on their table. They'd been working a neighborhood that an Irish gang claimed, and Bucky with his charming cons, without a drop of Irish in him, would've been doomed without his skinny pool shark wingman. Steve could slip right out of pure English to English-Irish mishmash, his accent a tangled mix of Brooklyn and turn-of-the-century Belfast. Sometimes, like now, the accent shows up first.

 

 

“Is that your real voice?” Pepper asks, sounding startled yet oddly quiet at the same time. Steve blinks, realizing what he's done. It would be silly to change back, so he just smiles, even though no one will see it but the squirrel watching him from that tree to his left.

 

 

“It's all real, kinda, but this is the way I first talked, yeah.”

 

 

“You should do it more often.”

 

 

Steve doesn't say it, but maybe, just maybe, he will.

 

 

~ ~ ~

 

 

Gabe is old now, thick head of white hair and wrinkles around his brown eyes, but those eyes are as lively and mischievous as ever. “Well, well, look at you, Cap. Steve Rogers, back from the dead and in my office.” He gets up, coming around the desk surprisingly fast for a man with a walking stick. Steve hurries forward, expecting a handshake or something, and ends up wrapped in a bear hug.

 

 

“You crazy bastard, I knew it wasn't some kind of fake on the news. Anna said I had to be wrong, but I knew it!”

 

 

Steve laughs unsteadily as he returns the hug. “Yeah, it was really me, Gabe. Woke up to a whole new world and started fighting aliens within the month.” Drawing back, he shakes his head. “It's good to see you, Gabe. Head of the history department? It, uh, said on the directory sign.”

 

 

“Yep,” Gabe says, settling back down into his chair. “I could've retired – probably should have – but I love my work and I still get to teach. I love my kids.”

 

 

Dropping into the chair across from Gabe's desk, Steve grins. He can understand that. “Hey, as long as you like it, you should do exactly what you want to do.” His eyes land on a photo sitting on Gabe's desk – it's a younger version of the man in front of him, only a little older than he was the last time Steve saw him. He has his arm around the shoulders of a petite Asian woman, who also looks familiar... It takes Steve a minute, but then he remembers. “Hey, isn't that Jim's sister?”

 

 

“Yeah, that's Anna,” Gabe says with a soft smile. “You know what it's like to bond, you had Agent Carter – I went out to Fresno to see Jim, shook his little sister's hand, and that was it.” He snaps his fingers. “Four kids and ten grandchildren later, and a great-grandchild on the way, now.”

 

 

Steve fidgets a little. Because yeah, he knows what it's like, but not because of Peggy. “Actually, Gabe, Peggy and I, we weren't... I hear it's not a big deal, now, to date someone you aren't bonded to, for the long term. She and I, we were like that.”

 

 

“Huh,” Gabe says, thoughtful. “That explains a little. So maybe you'll find someone now. Might even help you adjust.”

 

 

“Maybe,” Steve allows. “It's... not that simple though. It's triadic, they've known each other for a decade now. And, uh, it's Tony Stark and Pepper Potts.”

 

 

Gabe's jaw drops, and then he bursts out laughing. “Christ, what would our mad engineer say?” Mad engineer was what the Commandos had taken to calling Howard, and Steve almost laughs. He'd liked Howard well enough, though he can't say he ever really knew him – and yet, the warm amusement of a dark but simpler time is mixed with a flash of bitterness that doesn't belong to him. He has to assume it comes from Tony, from the link between them, but he doesn't understand it. So he tries not to think about it. It's something he doesn't have the right to understand yet, but maybe one day Tony will explain it to him.

 

 

“I have no idea,” he says with a shake of his head, because it's true. He doesn't know how Howard would have reacted to something like this – although, it does bring the unsettling thought that, without the ice, Steve could have met Tony, if not Pepper, as an adult meeting a _child_. Not unheard of, when it comes to bonding, but it's one of those things people just don't talk about. And even thinking it isn't pleasant at all.

 

 

“Well, it doesn't matter now, really,” Gabe says, clapping him on the back. “You've got one hell of a second chance, Cap. What are you doing with it?”

 

 

In the end, isn't that the question of the hour?

 

 

~ ~ ~

 

 

He’s been putting it off, Steve won’t deny that. This visit, it’s not... It’s not easy, not at all. But it’s also something that he has to do. They aren’t all buried here, his men - Jim and Gabe aren’t buried anywhere at all yet, thank God, Dernier and Falsworth are buried back in their own countries - but most of them are. The ones who are, he visits, each one. But there’s only one, the one he leaves for last, that he has to see.

 

 

James Buchanan Barnes

1920 - 1945  
Sgt. U.S. Army  
107th Battalion  
  
  


Steve’s fingers brush over the letters, the stone warm under his fingers thanks to the early-June sun. It’s ironic, when he thinks about the bitter cold of the day Bucky died. (It’s not just his own fate that makes Steve hate the cold.) Steve pushes back the memories, lips pressed tightly together.

 

 

“Hey, Buck,” he says, voice rough. “Christ, I can just hear ya raggin’ on me for talkin’ to your empty grave like this. Can’t help it, though. I just - I know it was your choice, but you died protectin’ me, and I’m - I’m sorry, all right? I’m just so goddamned sorry.”

 

 

He sighs again, falling silent for a while. Eventually, he ends up sitting by the headstone, odd as he may look. “I’ve bonded,” he says out of nowhere. “Can hear it now, you sayin’ ‘I told you so’. Not sure how I feel ‘bout it; it’s, well... It’s triadic. I haven’t met... Their names are Pepper and Tony, I haven’t met Pepper yet. Not in person anyway, we’ve talked though. And Tony and me, we got off to a bad start. Before we knew, see. He took off before I did, when we bonded, by the way. So this mess isn’t all me this time. Oh, and did I mention, he’s Howard’s kid? It’s all just... strange. Like wakin’ up in the future wasn’t crazy enough.”

 

 

That’s an understatement, and even texting with Tony now that Steve’s got the hang of it and talking to Pepper on the phone hasn’t fixed the problem. It’s helped, but it hasn’t _fixed_ a damn thing.

 

 

“I’m not sure what to do, Bucky.” The words are tired, as tired as Steve feels, but it’s such a relief to say them, even if no one alive can hear him. “Where do I even start?” This is the kind of thing he can’t say to anyone, and that is probably the worst part of waking up in the future. Not that he’d have Bucky regardless, but there’d have been Peggy and the rest of his Commandos. No one knew him like Bucky, no one ever could, but at least they knew the person behind the costume. Now, there’s no one in Steve’s life who does, and while he could probably talk to Gabe again, or Jim if he wanted, that isn’t fair to them now. They left that part of life behind a long time ago.

 

 

Some might think that should make him all the more grateful for Tony and Pepper. But since they are currently the most confusing thing about this new life, that idea doesn’t really work in practice. He supposes that, eventually, they’ll know Steve as opposed to Cap, but they don’t yet. And even if they already did, they can’t help him with his biggest troubles when they are the center of those troubles, right?

 

 

As if his thoughts caused it, Steve’s phone buzzes in his pocket. Pulling it out, he can’t help the wry smile. Tony, of course. He texts, and Pepper calls. **So, where are you today, soldier boy?**

 

 

Steve hesitates, but in the end he types back, **Arlington**. Tony’s no fool, and it’s not hard to guess this is a difficult visit. He isn’t sure if he hopes Tony leaves it alone or says something about it. There’s a longer pause than usual between messages, so Steve assumes Tony’s keeping quiet. He stands, brushing grass from his pants, fingers grazing Bucky’s headstone one last time in farewell before he walks away. He’s at his bike when his phone buzzes again.

 

 

**You OK?**

 

 

There’s so many ways Steve could answer that - lying’s easy enough in writing, and texts are just a new way of writing. But he doesn’t think he wants to lie to Tony. He said he didn’t know where to start with this bond he’s got, but he thinks dishonesty is a bad place to begin. If nothing else, he can be honest and see where it gets him, right? **No** , he sends back.

 

 

He isn’t expecting his phone to ring a moment later. “Hello?”

 

 

“Why would you do that to yourself? Why torture yourself with it?” Tony sounds... furious, and Steve can’t figure out why.

 

 

“My best friend’s here,” he tries to explain. “I had to pay my respects. I had to... say goodbye right. I didn’t have time before.” But true as all this is, Steve can’t deny the pain it’s causing him to be here, faced with all he’s lost and can’t ever get back. His best friend, his world... He can’t hide the sadness, the _loneliness_ in his voice. Which is ironic, considering he’s talking to one of his soulmates.

 

 

There’s silence on the other end of the line, long enough that Steve would think Tony’d hung up except he can hear him breathing. Then - “Come home.”

 

 

What? “What?” Steve asks, blankly.

 

 

“I know, I know, you’ve still got a week left and you wanted to see things on your own so you could get used to this time. Just - you can learn about this world here too. With us. Not just me and Pep; Bruce is here too, I’m working on Barton and Romanoff, and I’ve got Thor’s Jane and Darcy here so I’m sure I’ll have our demigod showing up eventually. You don’t have to be the goddamned Lone Ranger.” Tony sighs, the sound crackling down the line. “Steve. _Come home_.”

 

 

It’s the first time Steve’s heard Tony use his name unbidden, and like when he heard Pepper use it during that first phone call, it makes him catch his breath. He sits on his bike, phone pressed to his ear and helmet dangling by its strap from his free hand. He looks up, staring at the rows of white headstones.

 

 

Gabe had said to grab this second chance with both hands. Bucky’d kick his ass for wandering around like a lost puppy the way he’s been doing – and so would Peggy, come to think of it. And in all honesty, he wants to go back. He’s not sure he can think the word ‘home’ yet and mean it, but...

 

 

“All right,” he says. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

 

 


End file.
